


embers

by renquise



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Established Relationship, Foot Massage, Intercrural Sex, M/M, immortal beings with the energy of teenage dudes being dumb yet wholesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:21:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26946601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: Thanatos runs his fingers over the line of Zagreus's calf where flickers of flame recede into his skin, then pushes into the muscle with a firm touch. Zagreus jolts under his hands.“Ahh, how did you know that my legs are sore from all that running?” Zagreus laughs, a little breathless.
Relationships: Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 787





	embers

Thanatos is familiar, by now, with the eager step of Zagreus coming up behind him. There’s no one else in the house who rushes so, even if the faint hiss of his burning feet didn’t give him away.

“That was quick. What happened this time.”

Zagreus shrugs eloquently. He shifts on his feet, back and forth, perhaps antsy to run again. 

“Well, I tried to catch a raft to another bit of Asphodel, but I was a little hasty about it, and I fell off the side into lava, and I tried to get out of the lava and I fell off the other side into more lava. Those rafts are really rickety. We need better public transport infrastructure for the bloodless masses, says I.” 

“Hm,” Thanatos says. This is why he floats. “Have you considered avoiding the lava?”

Zagreus makes a face. “Now you sound like your brother.”

“Hypnos can make a good point once every few eons.”

“You haven’t had to listen to him repeatedly provide commentary on your latest demise, have you? Maybe you should give it a go, just the once. Like I said, this is giving me a whole new appreciation for our lack of shade-oriented infrastructure.” Zagreus waves a finger, as if sketching out plans for sturdier lava ferries for the house contractor.

Thanatos ducks his head, huffing out a laugh. Zagreus grins, looking immensely pleased with himself. It’s ridiculous and endearing. 

Zagreus leans on the banister and lets go of a gust of breath, looking out at the slow current of the Styx drawing into the house. His shoulder knocks into Thanatos’s, a warm line against his arm. He stays settled there.

Now that he’s stilled, he looks—tired. Worn around the edges. The laurels in his hair are ashy, slow embers instead of sparks. 

When Zagreus was young, the flames at his feet still flickered unevenly sometimes. Thanatos doesn’t remember much of his childhood, but he remembers being at play together, remembers Zagreus’s eyes fading and his limbs collapsing under him, remembers the soles of his feet ashy and grey and failing fast. Remembers running for Nyx, shifting across the palace in frantic uneven spurts. It hasn’t happened in eons. 

“Maybe you should rest, before you set out again.” 

Zagreus boggles at him. “Rest, he says. He who hasn’t taken a proper break in at least a millennium.”

Thanatos slides his eyes away from him. “That’s different.”

“It isn’t, really. Listen, I’ll rest if you lay down with me. Literally, just for a moment, it’s all I ask.” Zagreus grins at him. “Deal?”

He feels for the weave of fate and mortal lives. There’s a lull in work at the moment. “It’s doable.”

Zagreus looks staggered, as if an arrow just caught him in the back. “I didn’t expect you to actually say yes.” He reaches out to clasp Thanatos’s hand. “Can’t take it back now! Or, you can, if you want to. I don’t want to push you. But I’d really like that.” 

Zagreus, earnest as ever, and always so careful not to cage him in, even though he knows—must know that Thanatos wants this, wants him. It’s frustration that makes him shift them both to Zagreus’s chambers, directly onto Zagreus’s bed.

Zagreus laughs, flopping back on the covers. “Alright, alright, you’ve made your point. Come here, I’m not having your shoulder wings poking me in the eye.”

Zagreus’s hands are sure and familiar on the catches of his armor, undoing it and deftly placing it to the side. His hands smooth over the fall of Thanatos’s chiton, then pat his chest. “There. Much better.”

Thanatos settles his hand on Zagreus’s shin. He can feel the heat of him even through his greaves. “May I.”

Zagreus blinks at him. “Of course. I mean, wait, may you what?”

“May I take these off,” Thanatos says, indicating his greaves. He feels awkward, unwieldy.

“Sure?” Zagreus blinks at him, reaching for the buckles at the back of his calves.

Thanatos bats his hands away. “Let me do it,” he says. 

It comes off more stern than he intends, but Zagreus settles back, his eyes bright and curious, flickering from Thanatos’s hands to his face. Always greedy, always wanting, always reaching for more, and always so taken aback when someone reaches back to him.

Thanatos pulls Zagreus’s leg into his lap and undoes the buckles of his greave, setting it to the side. The flames around Zagreus’s ankles lick up around his hands, hungry for the touch of air. 

Thanatos runs his fingers over the swell of his calf where the flickers of flame recede into his skin, then pushes into the muscle with a firm touch. Zagreus jolts under his touch with a sharp intake of breath.

“Ahh, how did you know that my legs are sore from all that running?” Zagreus laughs, a little breathless. 

Thanatos shrugs. “You were slow, last time.”

“Yes, well, Hermes didn’t manage to find me.” Zagreus lets out a long, hissing breath when Thanatos pushes his knuckles up the line of his calf, a flicker of flame following his hands. “Not that this is unwelcome. Thank you.”

“Mm.” 

Zagreus opens his mouth, then closes it. “Just a sec, I have, for your hands, if you want—” He reaches over to his bookshelves and pulls out a vial.

Thanatos uncorks it. It smells grassy and sunlit, more like the world above than the world below. He wonders where it came from. He pours it into his hand, the oil spilling between the cracks of his fingers.

He touches his hands to Zagreus’s calves, and the oil bursts into flames. 

He and Zagreus both stare at the smoking flames burning merrily on his calves.

“Uh. Whoops. Didn’t think of that. Good thing everything here is mostly fireproof! I guess we’ll just let that burn out?”

Thanatos would put his head in his hands, if they weren’t full of burning oil. He can almost hear the next staff meeting. Yes, my lord Hades, I’m sleeping with your rebellious son, and we burned down half the house because I couldn’t be trusted around his thighs. 

Zagreus snickers, and Thanatos can’t help but grin. 

Zagreus looks thoughtfully at his still very burning calves. “Hey, those odd-looking mollusks I found last time in Asphodel. Do you think we could—”

“No.” 

“Like a clam bake!”

“No.”

He puts his hands to Zagreus’s calf once again when the flames die down, and Zagreus quiets under his touch. Flickering tongues still lick between his fingers, but it’s manageable. 

Zagreus’s leg jolts in his grip when he presses into a tight-wound knot. Flames flare under his touch, turning almost blue where Thanatos applies more pressure as the muscle of Zagreus’s calf shakes, then yields under Thanatos’s touch. 

He works down his leg to the glowing spur of his ankle, then digs the pads of his fingers into the embered arch of Zagreus’s foot. Zagreus shudders, his hands shifting restless over his thighs. Thanatos wonders if the lava seared his feet, if it left some residual ache now made bright and sweet. 

“You can go harder. It’s good, it’s really good, Than,” Zagreus says, his breath quick, all the bright blood in him alight. 

He’s learned that close like this, he can hear the rushing of Zagreus’s blood: not sluggish and slow like the Styx, but a rushing river current underlaid with the steady thumping of his heart. 

A few times, Thanatos only found Zagreus when he was already grievously injured, too far gone for even Thanatos to allow him a brief defiance of inevitability. He remembers Zagreus’s slow, dizzy smile at his approach, the pattering, frantic rhythm of his heart and the blood spilling out of him, a broken urn returning its contents to the river’s current. 

His thumb strokes over the vulnerable tendons at the back of Zagreus’s knee. The immortal warriors of Elysium know to hobble their opponent by severing them. He lets his fingers cage the back of his knee. It seems a meager shield.

He undoes the greave on Zagreus’s other leg, gathering it into his lap. Zagreus’s skin is warm as a hearthstone, inviting Thanatos to linger.

Zagreus is surprisingly quiet as Thanatos works on his calf, with only the occasional sharp inhale when Thanatos presses into a tight line of muscle, an exhale that shudders voiceless from his throat when the pressure releases. His blood is quick and hot and fast.

Thanatos looks up at him. 

Zagreus shifts his chiton over his lap, perhaps trying for subtlety. He’s hard. 

Thanatos stills his hands. He’s not sure if he should remark on it. 

“Uh. Sorry.” Zagreus drapes his arm over his lap. “It’s just, um. That feels incredible. And your hands, look, they’re really good, alright.” 

His eyes dart away, and he moves, as if to pull his leg back to his chest. Thanatos clasps his ankle. Zagreus is bold in so many things, and it confuses Thanatos to see him so tentative in others.

“Than? I don’t mean to make this awkward. I can—”

“Let me finish what I started.” Thanatos doesn’t mean it to sound like an entreaty. “Lie down on your front so I can do your thighs.” 

Zagreus blinks, then grins, his heart flayed open for all to see, as always. It almost hurts to look at. Thanatos’s chest squeezes tight.

Zagreus huffs out a laugh. “Meticulous as always, Than.”

He shimmies out of his leggings and turns over in a rush of enthusiasm. His hips hitch up, then flatten in the bedding. 

He looks at Thanatos over his shoulder. “Can I— um.” 

Thanatos puts a hand on Zagreus’s thigh. “You can move, if you want.”

“I—this is embarrassing, alright, I may not last long.”

“That’s—that’s fine.”

He feels undone by the spread of Zagreus’s strong thighs, the restless hitch of his hips, the dip of his lower back. The rucked-up fall of his chiton is somehow more obscene than if he were entirely naked: the intimate crease of his upper thigh half-obscured, the cut of his hip hidden under the drape of blood-red cloth.

He knows he can’t stay long, that his duty ever-calls. But here, now, he feels as though he could spend eternity thus, anchored by the rush of warm blood coursing in Zagreus’s veins, Zagreus’s body so sweetly responsive to his touch.

Zagreus looks at him over his shoulder, his eyes bright and inviting. 

Thanatos digs his thumbs into the meat of his thigh, smoothing upwards, and Zagreus drops his head with a groan. His thighs part when Thanatos pushes his knuckles along his thigh, his hips tipping towards him. It’s a little overwhelming.

He works through Zagreus’s thighs, smoothing the muscle into softness. He can hear the fast, eager rush of Zagreus’s blood as if it were his own, the panting of his breath: alive, alive, so very alive, blood and light in his veins.

He puts a hand to Zagreus’s waist and leans down to catch his lips over his shoulder, and Zagreus's body tenses under Thanatos’s hands, his hips pressing into the covers. His foot kicks up, a glancing brand of warmth against Thanatos’s side. He’s quiet as he comes, his breath coming in gasps.

It feels like a victory to see Zagreus dazed and undone by his hands. His eyes lidded, his mouth soft, the restless energy in him becalmed. 

“Come here,” Zagreus says, beckoning. “Than.”

“I don’t know what—” He doesn’t know what he wants. Only knows that the warmth of Zagreus’s skin is potent as any ambrosia, and he is made addled and dumb by it.

“That’s fine.” Zagreus’s voice is warm. “Let me—Look, I don’t really know what I’m doing either, I just, I want to make you feel good. Is that okay? Give me the oil, I swear I won’t light myself on fire again.”

He takes the oil and smooths it along the inside of his thighs. Thanatos can feel his brain shorting out. 

“Uh. So yeah. Achilles said this was a nice thing we could do,” Zagreus says. He’s flushed an enticing human-red down his chest. “If you just—here, lay down next to me, okay?”

Zagreus lays him down in his fine wool covers and invites him to curl around his back, encouraging his arms around him. He fumbles through the folds of Thanatos’s chiton, guides Thanatos’s cock between his thighs. The space between them is slick and hot and inviting. Thanatos buries a noise in the curve of Zagreus’s shoulder when his hips hitch against him.

“Yeah, there we go,” Zagreus says breathlessly. His hand cards through Thanatos’s hair, coming to rest at his nape. “Gods, you’re gorgeous, Than. You’re so good to me.”

Thanatos catches Zagreus’s mouth over his shoulder, kissing him messy and open-mouthed. The laurels in Zagreus's hair spark and flare as he moves against him. Thanatos doesn’t last long, undone by the eager press of Zagreus’s body, the quick pulse at his neck. His mouth is eager and heated, its warmth almost too intense when he licks between Thanatos’s lips. Zagreus's hand is a bright brand at the back of his neck when Thanatos muffles a cry in his shoulder.

When his breath slows again, Zagreus turns in Thanatos’s loose grasp. His eyes are bright, and his mouth is lovely and inviting. Thanatos wants to lie forever by the banked embers of him like a dog by the hearth.

Zagreus pulls the cover out from underneath them, cleaning the inside of his thighs, then tossing it to the floor. 

“I’ll grab that later, so that Dusa doesn’t have to deal with it. Stay here a little longer?”

Thanatos catches one of Zagreus’s hands. Zagreus flexes against his loose grip, the tendons moving under Thanatos’s hands. He doesn’t attempt to break free, for once in his immortal life.

“Are you trying to keep me here? Usually it’s me doing that,” Zagreus says, looking at him through his eyelashes. His lashes are dark and sooty, dipping against his pale skin like ink on parchment. They’re almost lost against the dark sclera of his right eye.

“I suppose so.”

Thanatos knows that when Zagreus falls in the halls of the underworld, he will reemerge from the river, whole and heart-beating and complaining of whatever managed to catch him. It’s useless to stand sentinel by the current of the river where it flows into the house, waiting, and perhaps more useless still to try and catch Zagreus’s thread as he winds through the maze of the underworld. Thanatos can’t figure out who is more selfish: Zagreus in his reckless, heedless handling of himself in pursuit of freedom, or Thanatos, for wanting to keep him close and well. 

He cups his hands around Zagreus’s waist and brings him close: the bright blood of him river-quick, the stubborn fire of him warm and alight.


End file.
